About Applied

Applied is the platform for unbiased hiring. 

We’re pushing back against outdated hiring practices by rebuilding the process and leaving CVs behind. Our product is born out of scientific research, data-driven methodologies and has a purpose: it removes flawed signifiers, mitigates systemic inequalities, and surfaces the best candidates, taking the guesswork out of hiring.

Given what we do, we’re keen to build diverse teams and offer flexible and part-time working hours. We trust people to work enough hours to do good work, at times that suit you and your team.

You can read more about us in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch and New Scientist and learn more about how we give Candidates useful feedback here. 

The Role

We’re changing the way hiring is done for good and need a Lead Product Designer who is curious, empathetic to user needs, and always asking questions. This person loves a problem rather than a solution and will work directly with the product and engineering teams, working with them as design partners. The Lead Product Designer will impact how user problems are defined, approached, and eventually solved. They'll continuously work to learn more about our users and involve the rest of the team in solving user needs, helping us set the processes and structures needed to create a delightful product to debias hiring.

In your first 6 months at Applied you'll:

• Make big contributions to our product. You'll be working with the product and engineering team from day one and getting stuck into our scrum process from the very start.

• Contribute to defining the product roadmap, facilitating team workshops and working with the PM and our UX designer to identify improvements to the product and then delivering beautiful designs to implement

• Conducts user research independently and pre-empt some research using experience. Involve everyone in a culture of research, design, and testing.

• Deliver iterative design improvements to the product and track its performance

• Shape our process - we love a good retro and continually inspecting and improving how we work is core to how we work as a team

About Our Product and Engineering Team 

A note about our team: we place high value on trust, communication, ambition, accountability, user & data driven decisions, and have a bias towards action and curiosity.

We’re a team who:

• Are passionate about making high quality digital products that add real and meaningful value to people's lives

• Can collaborate effectively, inspire those around them, and start from a position of empathy.

• Understand the business objectives, the needs of the broader team and work with engineering and product managers to prioritise accordingly.

• Are comfortable working in an early-stage environment, and the autonomy and uncertainty that change can bring.

Our Lead Product Designer should:

• Communicate clearly to the team about UX projects, prioritising design components by breaking design problems down into small batch solutions

• Get the right balance between team workshops, user research, and creating mockups and high-res designs to solve real user needs.

• Conducts regular user research session and impact UX changes and improvements to the UI- being plugged into what the users are feeling by setting up a relationship with / without the customer facing team

• Facilitate workshops with the product team to turn insights into great user experiences

• Use Qualitative and Quantitative metrics to inform your designs, working with the PM to create and test hypotheses

• Understand and translate how human behaviour relates to product use and impacts visual design and UX

• Lead how we approach product design at Applied, setting in the right processes to discover, validate and design products that are functional as well as delightful

You'll benefit from:

• Equity in the business

• Wellbeing benefit and access to Spill

• Remote working budget 

• Internet allowance

• Learning & development budget

• Involvement in other aspects of the business, from strategy, management and training, to shaping team culture

• Being part of something that's both commercially successful and socially important

We’re working remotely first and finding better options for folks who need an office. Our general aim is to have 2 away days throughout the year so we can all meet in person at least a few times a year. Please note that this role requires that you be within 4 hours of GMT at most, as greater time difference makes collaboration much more difficult.

What are the next steps?

Our process is progressive - Instead of submitting a CV, you’ll answer 4 work-related questions. Our goal is to assess your approach to a problem and better understand what knowledge and skills you have. 

If you work at Applied, you'll need to search for things, so feel free to do this during the application as it isn’t a test. 

Your answers will be anonymized, randomized and reviewed by the team. We use these scores to shortlist and ask you to submit a portfolio for review- where we go through a structured set of criteria (explicitly NOT focussing on the companies/brands within). Following portfolio review, we do a design problem solving interview and collaborative product problem solving interview. We think giving feedback is incredibly valuable for candidates, so at the end of the process you'll see how well you performed during the application process.